If Charles insists on hectoring Ministers, his views mustn't be state secrets

On Tuesday, the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, ruled that the Prince of Wales’s letters to Labour ministers must be kept secret despite an earlier decision by three judges that they should be made public.

According to Mr Grieve, the publication of 27 letters written between 2004 and 2005 might ‘seriously damage’ his future role as king, because they were ‘in many cases particularly frank’ and would have ‘potentially undermined [Prince Charles’s] position of political neutrality’.

Not for the first time, Mr Grieve has clearly served the cause of secrecy so dear to his heart. But if he thinks that he has defended the interests of the monarchy, he should reflect again. He has in effect removed the Prince from the frying pan, where he was enduring only moderate heat, and tossed him directly into the roaring fire.

Passionate: At peak periods, Charles's words have poured out at the rate of 1,000 letters a year to ministers and other public figures

The clever thing for him to have said would have been that Prince Charles wrote these letters in confidence and they should therefore remain private. He might even have implied that they were relatively insignificant and even rather boring.

Instead, he has painted a picture of an opinionated Prince expressing tendentious views which, were they to come to light, might shock some people and embarrass the monarchy. Our natural response is to want to know exactly what Prince Charles wrote.

In effect, Mr Grieve has — presumably inadvertently — made the case for publishing the letters. For if they are so seismic, if they really might divide opinion and call into question his fitness to be King, surely we, as his future subjects, have a right to know their contents.

Secrecy: Attorney General Dominic Grieve ruled against publishing the letters written to Labour ministers by the Prince

Previously, I had thought Mr Grieve a somewhat anachronistic figure who might have strayed out of a Dickens novel. One imagines that a clap on his shoulder would release clouds of dust. Until now, though, I had thought him intelligent. Now I am not so sure — unless he was deliberately trying to undermine the Prince.

As it happens, I probably agree with much of what the heir to the throne believes about such issues as modern architecture, organic food and fox hunting. But that is not the point. If he writes opinionated letters to government ministers trying to get them to change their minds, he should not expect those letters to stay private.

As long as they remain so, people are bound to suspect that he may have covertly influenced, and even altered, government policy, which is not what the Prince of Wales is supposed to do under our constitutional arrangements. Mr Grieve’s lurid characterisation of these letters increases one’s suspicions that this may be precisely what he has done.

Although I may often agree with the Prince, I don’t think it wise for him to try to influence ministers in this way. The monarchy will survive and prosper as long as it remains above politics. Once it becomes opinionated it becomes divisive, and when it becomes divisive it will attract criticism and create enemies.

The Queen knows this. We have little idea what she thinks about anything, and can only guess. The BBC’s Frank Gardner recently let slip that Her Majesty had expressed surprise that the radical Islamist Abu Hamza had not been deported. (He finally has been.) But this was hardly a divisive point of view, and in any case she did not want us to know about it.

As an intelligent man who is perhaps sometimes a little underemployed, the Prince of Wales operates on very different principles. He is forever sticking his oar in publicly or privately. For example, he worked behind the scenes to scupper a £3 billion development of Chelsea barracks in London, funded by the Qataris.

When giving vent to his views, he tends to use colourful language. In extracts of his diaries published by the Mail on Sunday in 2006, he amusingly described Chinese officials as ‘appalling old waxworks’.

Opinionated: The Prince doesn't shy away from issues and often puts his point across using colourful language

By securing an injunction preventing further publication, Prince Charles established that his diaries were private property. However, I don’t believe the same can be said of his handwritten so-called ‘black spider memos’ sent to ministers with a view to bending their ears on matters of public policy.

Given a choice between being open or secretive, Dominic Grieve is apt to choose the latter. In June, he rejected calls for an inquest into the death in 2003 of Dr David Kelly, saying there was ‘overwhelming evidence’ that the government scientist had killed himself. In fact, some perfectly sane observers doubt this. In any case, doesn’t natural justice demand that there should be an inquest into Dr Kelly’s death?

Two months ago, Mr Grieve decided
that the minutes of Labour Cabinet meetings in the run-up to the Iraq
war should be kept secret, thereby upholding the decision the Labour
government had made in its own interests. His ruling, criticised by the
Information Commissioner as ‘disappointing’, confirmed his reputation as
someone who is no enthusiast for open government.

Although in opposition he had championed the cause of the hacker Gary McKinnon, as Attorney General he has shown no such independence of mind, and seems to be guided by conventional

Whitehall thinking. Somewhat ludicrously, he recently claimed Britain would become a ‘pariah state’ if it quit the authority of the European Court of Human Rights.In a government that is promoting secret courts and email surveillance, Mr Grieve is the embodiment of the spirit of secrecy.

Incidentally, he has invoked the 1981 Contempt of Court Act against media organisations more frequently than any other Attorney General in recent times.

So will the Prince’s letters remain secret? The Guardian newspaper, which made the original application to see copies of the letters, intends to take the Government to the High Court. Let’s hope it succeeds, and that the Attorney General’s predisposition to sweep matters under the carpet is thwarted.

By depicting the letters in such sensational terms, he has only served to emphasise why it is in the public interest for them to be published. It is no part of his duty to attempt to protect the Prince of Wales from himself.

Moreover, Mr Grieve was wholly incorrect to say that the sending of letters by the Prince was part of his ‘preparation for kingship’. Did his mother bombard ministers with argumentative missives before becoming Queen, or has she done so since? No. Where is the constitutional precedent in modern times for Prince Charles’ behaviour? There isn’t one.

The lesson of this affair — apart from the secretive proclivities of Dominic Grieve — is that Prince Charles should stop behaving like a politician who wants to change the world. Reticence and discretion are the proper preparation for kingship in a modern constitutional monarchy.

They go with the job, I’m afraid, and the sooner the Prince of Wales learns this, the better it will be for him and the monarchy. If he is outspoken, he will alienate great numbers of his future subjects.

And the person who understands this better than anyone else in the world is his mother, the Queen.